Results tagged “schoolsroundup”

DCPS teachers who supported D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s contract proposal from the beginning have got to be annoyed. On Monday, Rhee announced that the minimum 28 percent across the board raises offered in July now must be trimmed due to the poor economy. The contract negotiations have reached their 15th month. The District will soon submit a revised offer to the Washington Teachers’ Union, which has thus far resisted the contract. Rhee did state that funding from private foundations for the controversial merit pay provisions in the plan have not been affected.

Local blogger DC Teacher Chic reported today on her blog that D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee will host Q&A sessions for teachers this afternoon (Wednesday, January 28) and tomorrow (Thursday, January 29), from 4-6 p.m. at 825 North Capitol Street, NE, in the 5th Floor Board Room. An open teacher Q&A sounds like a great idea, but good luck to the teachers scrambling to get from their classrooms to DCPS, in this weather, only 45 minutes after school lets out.

There's been a lot of back and forth of late between The Washington Teachers’ Union and DCPS about a policy commonly called a 90-day plan. Some within the union have accused Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee of using 90-day plans as a means of targeting older teachers for dismissal. The Washington Post's Bill Turque reported that Rhee spokesperson Dena Iverson denies any age discrimination, arguing that the average age of DCPS teachers who Rhee has placed on 90-day probations is similar to the average age of the total teaching corps (Turque puts that age in the mid-40s.)

Over the holidays, DCPS sent letters to parents notifying them if an “unqualified” teacher was teaching their children, resulting in a series of complaints and bureaucratic messes. For example, parents were asked to log into the DCPS website to get the names of the teachers, but those who logged in found their children’s teachers from the previous academic year. A number of teachers objected, noting that they had been incorrectly listed as “unqualified.” The letters also raised a sticky question: what does “qualified” even mean?

One of the drawbacks to having a high-profile figure like Michelle Rhee running the city schools is that so much of the education coverage tends to be about Rhee herself, rather than the work her office is (or isn't) doing. In a column last weekend, Colbert I. King argued that "the issue is not whether the chancellor is a polarizing figure with her take-no-prisoners approach, or is a fearless crusader against defenders of the status quo. At issue is whether public education in the District is being improved."

Over the weekend the Post launched its investigative series/Pulitzer bait on the District’s charter schools, which together enroll about a third of D.C.’s students. In addition to profiling the high-performing D.C. Prep, the Post dug into the suspect financial benefits some members of the D.C. Public Charter School Board have received as a result of their board work, mostly through the complicated world of charter school loans and financing. The Post found conflicts of interest involving nearly $200 million at more than a third of the city’s charter schools.

DCPS is now home to 23 new teachers with certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, more than doubling their ranks since 2007. This is a big deal, and good news for the District, where, according to a NBPTS release, only 47 teachers have ever received the honor.

Since D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee hit the cover of TIME Magazine last week, our “Michelle Rhee” Google alert has been blowing up — there is something about Rhee that gets people’s attention and elicits a response. Take this quote from the TIME story:

"The thing that kills me about education is that it's so touchy-feely," she tells me one afternoon in her office…"People say, 'Well, you know, test scores don't take into account creativity and the love of learning,'" she says… “I'm like, 'You know what? I don't give a crap.' Don't get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job."

The big news last week was Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s presentation to the D.C. Council of her five-year action plan for DCPS, which included ideas like a parents’ academy designed to get parents to be involved in their kids’ education, and the creation of “theme” high schools for technology, foreign language, or gifted students. The Post has more, or you can download the entire plan here.

Cue the “Hurricane Rhee” jokes. Here’s the latest being floated by Mayor Adrian Fenty and D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee: ask the federal government to declare the D.C. public schools in a “state of emergency.”

DC Teacher Chic, one of the city’s most prolific teacher-bloggers, has thrown in the towel, posting to her blog on Friday, “I am no longer an employee of DC Public Schools, and for the first time in weeks, I feel like I can take a deep breath.”

Sixty-one DCPS schools are serving as polling places in the District today, in addition to following a normal academic schedule. (The Washington Teachers’ Union had asked schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to close the schools for election day, but their request was denied.) According to a spokesperson for the District, additional security has been put in place to ensure the safety of students, and “guarantees” have been made for light and heat (although one would hope those things were in place already).

While other school districts like Fairfax County and states like Massachusetts are in the midst of slashing schools budgets and cutting funding for education initiatives, D.C. seems to have found ways to avoid such measures, at least for a while. As we mentioned in the Morning Roundup, yesterday Mayor Adrian Fenty and D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee asked the Council to approve a relocation of $100 million from the approximately $750 million schools budget. According to a DCPS release, the money is to be distributed as follows:

Last Friday was payday for the 3,293 students at 15 D.C. middle schools who are enrolled in the District’s Capital Gains program. The pilot program, co-funded by the District and Harvard University, allows students to earn up to $100 every two weeks for meeting conditions based on good academics, attendance, and behavior.

Some notable finger pointing over the past week: a list showing 90 unfilled teacher vacancies surfaced, prompting complaints of a teacher shortage caused by Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s firing 270 teachers this summer; the long-awaited schools modernization plan was criticized by the D.C. council as incomplete and lacking community input; and a Washington Teachers Union information session about the quagmired teachers’ contract negotiations descended into name-calling and shouting matches. Perhaps Post columnist Jay Mathews had the most grown-up solution: just fire them!

To absolutely no one’s surprise, DCPS enrollment hasdropped 8.7 percent, according to a preliminary count by an independent auditor. While late registration will likely raise the final tally slightly, DCPS spokesperson Dena Iverson said that as of last week, 45,135 students were enrolled in the District's 120 schools, down from last year’s 49,422, continuing a trend in declining enrollment that has persisted since the 1960s.

Earlier this month, we described a new report from a federal court monitor that placed heavy blame on the District for its inability to provide special education services for its nearly 11,000 special needs students. As Post columnist Colbert King put it somewhat dramatically at the time, “the courtroom drama I witnessed this week underscored a sad reality: The one true safeguard between the city's most vulnerable residents and acts of governmental injustice is the black-robed figure in the courthouse.” While we’d like to think that statement veers toward the hyperbolic, court involvement in city administration is nothing new, and neither is what came next – the city official responsible ducking out of the spotlight.

In Denver a couple of weeks ago, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee provoked speculation with her comment that she had a “Plan B” ready on deck should the controversial teachers’ contract fail to pass. On Friday, Rhee revealed that Plan B.

One of the largest financial sinkholes for the D.C. government is that the city pays for approximately one quarter of its 9,400 special education (SPED) students to attend private school, to the tune of more than $200 million. Why the expense? Because the city’s public and public charter schools have thus far proved incapable of addressing those students’ learning needs. It’s a situation that doesn’t seemed to have improved over the past two years, according to a dismal new report from a federal court monitor who was appointed in 2006 to assess the District’s ability to eliminate a backlog of more than 1,000 SPED cases that were delaying placement for SPED students.

Speaking at an A-list (among education reformers at least) event in Denver on Sunday, Mayor Adrian Fenty let loose some choice words for the teachers’ unions that have been balking at D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee’s proposed contract, which centers on merit-based, rather than seniority-based, pay for teachers. When asked by News Hour reporter John Merrow about the union’s opposition, Fenty responded, “The American Federation of Teachers, which I don't think does anything for the people of the District of Columbia, is weighing in against it. And the only thing I can think of is that the heads of the union, they want to keep their jobs."

School starts on Monday, and even though Washington Teachers Union president George Parker recently told a group of protesting teachers that a tentative agreement could be expected within a week, it doesn’t look like we’re any closer to a contract vote for the District’s teachers. The negotiations hinge on D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s proposal to offer salaries upwards of $100,000 to teachers in exchange for increased accountability measures. Today, D.C. Wire reported that a recent poll sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers, the WTU’s parent union, found that teachers want to continue bargaining instead of voting on the proposal, by a margin of 3 to 1 among the 400 teachers polled. The findings should be taken with a grain of salt, however, since this is the same poll that was accused of being a “push poll” or biased against the proposal, while being conducted.

Volunteer Opportunities: With school starting in two weeks, we figure it’s a good time to highlight some of the ways to get involved and support local students. Most volunteer programs are actively recruiting for the fall, and there’s really something for everyone, from mentoring to coaching to sharing your inner-geek as an after-school technology teacher. A few opportunities are featured below, and feel free to make additional suggestions in the comments.

August is a mixed blessing – summer school is over and the afternoons are long, but teachers and students alike are aware that the first day of school is only a few weeks away. August should be a time for relaxation and preparation, but tempers have been running high for such a normally lazy month. The Washington Teachers’ Union and D.C. public schools are still locked in a stalemate over contract negotiations, the Mayor’s office is playing tug-of-war with the D.C. Council over the schools budget, and the Post is editorializing about all of it. Maybe it’s the heat.

This week marks the beginning of a series of meetings between teachers and officials from The Washington Teachers’ Union meant to clarify the much-discussed performance pay plan at the center of the ongoing teachers’ contract negotiations. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee has said that initial coverage of the proposal included some incorrect details, and promised to speak with union members during a Q&A at each meeting, telling the Post she plans to offer, "some solace and evidence that we are not going to be making these decisions capriciously or placing them solely in the hands of school principals."

Last week, we told you about D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s controversial new merit pay plan for teachers, as well as the impressive jump in DCPS test scores, both of which continued to provoke opinion throughout the weekend.

If you’re not already familiar with the way teachers in D.C. get paid, it basically works like this – the longer you teach, the more you make. DCPS teachers are compensated on a seniority-based scale (pdf), something that was designed to encourage retention, but unfortunately also means that teachers are paid for their loyalty, not their performance.

The kid who fell asleep and was left alone for hours on a bus operated by D.C. Public Schools may have stolen the show in school bus coverage last week, but the real story is a bizarre new proposal from the Federal Transit Authority that would prevent the District from using Metrobus to get kids to school, a long-standing practice that transports about 20,000 kids a day during the school year. The Examiner reports that the rule, which is applicable to all transit systems that receive federal funds, is designed to protect the charter bus industry, but will likely cost the city millions of dollars more than had been budgeted for student transport.

As a former high school teacher, I sometimes hear that past students have joined the military. There’s a decent sized JROTC presence in the D.C. public schools, and it wasn’t unheard of to see a military recruiter around the campus. Students in the JROTC talked up its scholarship opportunities, and several students, usually male, but not always, argued in classroom debates that the military was a good option for kids who couldn’t afford or didn’t want to go to college, or who sought a path to citizenship for themselves or their families. And each year, many students do enlist.

It’s been a bizarre week in D.C. education, as ostriches rallied on 14th St. and seemingly everyone from Katie Couric to Al Sharpton had their eye on the District’s schools. Thursday was the last day of classes for DCPS students, and while Mayor Adrian Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee commemorated the one year anniversary of the schools takeover at a press conference at Langdon Elementary, a smaller gathering at the corner of 14th and U streets NW attracted some curious looks and the occasional honk of support. DC Voice, a local organization focused on community involvement in schools, was introducing their new mascot, an ostrich meant to push parents and community members to “get their heads out of the sand and become involved in public education.”

To the discomfort of many a graduate, this week’s heat wave happens to coincide with the last week of classes for D.C. public schools, and students around the city are proudly perspiring beneath their polyester gowns as local schools hold their graduation ceremonies.